Abstract
It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain through the Creative Industries Mapping Documents developed by the Blair Labour government in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America, as well as through international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO.
This paper proposes that publicly funded arts and cultural organisations should aspire to, and be funded to, engage in Research and Experimental Development (R&D), particularly that which aims at innovation, that is, new social application.
Julian Thomas
The Australian
February 22, 2010 12:00AM
CONFUSION and disarray surround Stephen Conroy's decision to rebate licence fees for commercial television broadcasters.
The decision raises the most basic question that can be asked about government dispensation of any kind: what was this money for?
There are young Australians who are already making a name (and money) for themselves in the latest market for creative content – and it didn’t exist a moment ago. YouTube is a huge repository of amateur content, but it is also rapidly evolving into a site that has legally contracted Hollywood movies and TV shows but is working out ways to share revenues from advertising with gifted and committed amateurs whose creativity attracts a big following.
Can government play a role in assisting Australian creative talent to catch some of dynamism of emerging markets for culture?
Media companies’ campaign against internet piracy suffered a major setback last week when a federal court judgement let internet service providers off the hook for their customers’ illegal downloads. But the copyright wars are more than just a matter for the courts, write Julian Thomas and Ramon Lobato in Inside Story
The following report considers a number of key challenges the Australian Federal Government faces in designing the regulatory framework and the reach of its planned mandatory internet filter. Previous reports on the mandatory filtering scheme have concentrated on the filtering technologies, their efficacy, their cost and their likely impact on the broadband environment. This report focuses on the scope and the nature of content that is likely to be caught by the proposed filter and on identifying associated public policy implications.
Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy.
Australian Financial Review
Creativity is today’s ultimate black box a Rorschach blot onto which there are projected innumerable meanings. When academic Richard Green reviewed the literature recently, he found so much variation that he concluded the field was ‘so attenuated, extenuated, or misunderstood that operationalising of the key concepts is missing or impossible’. He tried to order the field, and constructed a profile of 42 models of creativity which, when combined with assorted variations and typologies, totted up 303 variables!
This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’.
One of the most wide-ranging and sophisticated critiques of creative industries policy argues that it is a kind of Trojan horse, secreting the intellectual heritage of the information society and its technocratic baggage into the realm of cultural practice
A fully revised edition of the leading Australian introductory text on media studies, incorporating extensive analysis of the impact of communications.
Much recent research into citizen journalism has focussed on its role in political debate and deliberation. Such research examines important questions about citizen participation in democratic processes – however, it perhaps places undue focus on only one area of journalistic coverage, and presents a challenge which only a small number of citizen journalism projects can realistically hope to meet.
Story Circle is the first collection ever devoted to a comprehensive international study of the digital storytelling movement, exploring subjects of central importance on the emergent and ever-shifting digital landscape.
* Covers consumer-generated content, memory grids, the digital storytelling youth movement, participatory public history, audience reception, videoblogging and microdocumentary
* Pinpoints who is telling what stories where, on what terms, and what they look and sound like
Faculty Seminar Series
Professor Justin O’Connor, Research Capacity Building Professor Tuesday 28th April 12pm-1pm The Hall (Z2-226) CI Precinct QUT Kelvin Grove
Creative labour: emancipation or honey-trap?
Why_do_some_ideas flourish and others fail?
Why is independent thought valued in some societies and discouraged in others?
Ecology is the study of how organisms relate to their environment. Following on from the success of his 2001 book The Creative Economy, leading thinker John Howkins applies ecological principles to the concepts of creativity and innovation, generating Creative Ecologies.
The pay TV industry has opened up a new front in its battle with free-to-air, writes Margaret Simons
Public service broadcasting was one of the great 20th century social innovations in media. The aim of public service broadcasters (PSBs) was to seek to harness the new mass media towards social purposes. These included nation-building, mass education, strengthening the information base of democracies, and broadly-based cultural improvement, particularly in areas such as documentaries, news and current affairs, and children’s programming.
Submission to the ABC and SBS Review, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
In the Vernacular brings together important works, written over a twenty-year period by Stuart Cunningham, one of Australia's leading scholars of media, culture and policy.
The second volume in 'The Cultures and Globalization Series' analyses the dynamic relationship in which culture is part of the process of economic change that in turn changes the conditions of culture.
Download paper: The creative application of knowledge in university education: a case study
Download paper: Designing a national innovation system to allow the creative industries to add value
Acknowledging and celebrating new energy around critiques of Australia’s National Innovation System, this paper explores the design of an innovation system that would harness energy from the Creative Industries. The notion that the Creative Industries are an important element of Australia’s innovation system has not, it seems, been self-evident.
The production of knowledge has become central to economic life. Competitiveness in the 21st century market place is now characterized by the ability to translate scientific and technological knowledge into innovation. But does this render cultural and social knowledge unimportant?
In this paper Jason Potts argues that the definition of cultural science depends on the definition of creative industries. The problem, however, is that unlike the definition of evolutionary economics, complexity science and new cultural studies, which are also elements of cultural science, the creative industries suffer multiple non-commensurable definitions. These are reviewed and analytic implications for the definition of cultural science are examined.
Published in Cultural Science, Vol 1, No 1 (2008)
